MetaTagz – WordPress Meta Tags Plugin
First of all I just need to give credit to Dougal Campbell because I more or less just took what he did and made it a little bit easier and more Search Engine ready. All I have to say is that his first WordPress Plugin was pretty damn good, it just needed a little tweaking for the way I needed to use it. The original plugin was called HeadMeta and left a little bit of coding for the custom fields.
Now on to the new Plugin…
MetaTagz – WordPress Meta Tags Plugin
MetaTagz is straight forward and easy to use. The application of the plugin involves the custom fields features found in the bottom of the Post/Page editing page in the WordPress Control Panel. Each meta tag used within the MetaTagz plugin has a special key. The content doesn’t involve any HTML coding at all either.
For Example if you wanted to add a custom meta description to your post/page, you would go down to the “Custom Fields” area and type in the following into each field:
key value would be: head_description
value would be: What ever you would like your description to be.
The output in the html would look like the following:
<meta name=”description” content=”What ever you would like your description to be.” />
The code comes out xhtml compatible so this plugin validates with any strict w3c validation.
So you do not need to worry about adding any special coding to any of the meta tags, the plugin is setup to have the proper formatting come through automatically. Here is an example of what the Custom Fields should look like once you have added your custom fields. The example shows the author, description, keywords, and title meta tags:
I have listed below the compatible meta tags and their associated keys to use when inputting them into the Custom Fields area in your administration.
- Title – head_title
- Description – head_description
- Keywords – head_keywords
- Robots – head_robots
- Abstract – head_abstract
- Author – head_author
- Copyright – head_copyright
- Distribution – head_distribution
- Expires – head_expires
- Language – head_language
- Refresh – head_refresh
- Revisit – head_revisit
Please let me know if you would like me to add any additional tags to this plugin and I will update those immediately. This is just a starting point. Your feedback is appreciated.
Installation
The current version 2.0 should be compatible with all know versions of WordPress. Let me know if you run into any problems. I will assume that you have never installed a WordPress plugin and start with basic installation instruction.
- Download the metatagz.zip file.
- Extract the metatagz.zip file.
- Take the contained file metatagz.php and using your favorite FTP program upload the metatagz.php file into the following directory: wp-content/plugins
- Go into your WordPress control panel and click on the “Plugins” menu item.
- You should now see the plugin listed in there with any other plugins that you may have in there.
- Select “Activate” on the far right and you are ready to roll.
If you ever need to update, just upload the newer version replacing the older version of the plugin.
Potential Problems
This plugin inserts the code into your template within the head where it says:
<?php wp_head(); ?>
If for some reason the plugin is not working or the placement of the code does not look correct when you view the source, try taking the above code and inserting it just below the <head> tag. If you can’t find that code try checking in the header.php file or even the index.php file. For best use, you can customize what template pages use or do not use this tag. If you end up with 2 titles you may need to delete any code that looks like the following from your template:
<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>
To learn more about meta tags and how to use them, check out the following links:
Not all meta tags are necessary, that’s why this plugin was created so that you can use whatever meta tags you choose.
Please let me know what you think!
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